Monster Manual: How Much Cut?

[Lizard]

I actually take more fault with this footnote than the rest of the post. It suggests that I've taken away a very different message from the conversations in which "Make it up!" has been a reply than you have. Balance, in the service of the protagonists, is a very plot-centric, player-involved use. Deciding how well the cat balances/hides/sneaks matters; the rules for how well a wizard's familiar serves him need to be at least sketched out.

Is that the same as the combat stats of a cat, though? A wizard could have a sparrow familiar, but do we need to know the sparrow's initiative check, except in the most extreme of situations?

Current game, we have a sorcerer who uses his familiar to deliver touch spells; initiative order matters; so do all of its other combat stats.

Arbitrary decisions that a monster does or doesn't "need" a stat because "Who would ever use it?" are almost guaranteed to result in bad or missing rules. Combat stats for the cat? What happens when one familiar attacks the other? Or when a raven attacks a druid in mouse form? Or when someone tosses Enlarge on a housecat, and you want the stats to properly scale? Or Awakens a porcupine? Or...

The only selling point D&D has over WOW and other online games is that D&D is limited only by the imagination of players. A decision that the only action which matters/can occur in a game is straight-up combat is a very poor one, and if the 4e Monster Manual is entirely based on "These monsters exist to provide for interesting combat encounters, and that's that", it will be the least useful iteration of that classic tome.

 

[kennew142]

I , on the other hand, think that it would absolutely suck if animals and vermin got cut from th 4E monster manual. No giant spiders? No giant snakes? No wolves?

Ken

This Ken agrees wholeheartedly with that Ken.

 

[Lizard]

In seven letters, you sum up why nothing you say has any redeeming value for my games.

I sit stunned and awed by your brilliant, point-by-point proof of why animals likely to be involved in rules-related situations should not have any stats to govern their interaction with said rules.

U haz 1 t3h int3rwebz.

 

[kennew142]

The advantage of a game like D&D is that it offers a huge palette for DMs to draw on. No DM will ever use ALL the monsters in the MM (at least not in one campaign...), but you never know which ones will suddenly appeal.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I've used many of the monsters on that list in many games.

(Of course, with the new design presumption being "Monsters live for five rounds, that's it, and they don't have any abilities/powers which are useful outside of their brief appearance on the battlemat", it is less likely someone will decide to make the Aranea the core of a global assassin/spy network, or have PCs try to adopt/raise winter wolf cubs to turn them from evil.)

You're welcome to your interpretation of the design presumption for 4e (no matter how full of hyperbole and lacking in factual basis), but this kind of statement just undermines the argument. Moving non-combat information out of a stat-block (used in combat) and moving into narrative doesn't mean that monsters have suddenly become two-dimensional. This is a terrible misrepresentation of the information we've been given.

 

[Lizard]

You're welcome to your interpretation of the design presumption for 4e (no matter how full of hyperbole and lacking in factual basis), but this kind of statement just undermines the argument. Moving non-combat information out of a stat-block (used in combat) and moving into narrative doesn't mean that monsters have suddenly become two-dimensional. This is a terrible misrepresentation of the information we've been given.

Read the design&dev article on monsters, including the pre-4e ones (like the recreation of the rust monster). It was pretty clearly stated:"A monster lasts about 5 rounds in combat. That means it can do, at most, 5 things. Anything beyond that is wasted and redundant." (The corollary, that if a monster does everything it can do in Comabt 1, it is boring in Combat 2, is never considered...)

Moreover, we're talking about combat -- or at least skill-related -- activities. The original question was "Why would you ever care about a cat's Balance check?" I showed why, using an example from real-world play, not an edge case I made up to prove a point. I also showed why combat stats for "normal" animals are useful.

When you talk of "moving non-combat skills into narrative", what do you mean?

If the 4e stat block for a cat is "Cats are agile.", with nothing to reflect this agility in play, it's useless when you want to determine if the familiar/animal companion/poymorphed wizard/beloved housepet can cross a narrow beam to escape a fire, run up a rope to get on a departing ship, or any other activity which tends to come up in adventure games, so we get back to "Make it up". Given that 4e gives everyone default skills, it's pretty easy to assume cats will be Trained in Acrobatics and Sneak (or whatever the 4e compressed skills will be called), and will likewise have a high dex (probably 14). Given that, you can fairly adjudicate things like the effects of dex buffing/debuffing on the cat, difficult surfaces, taking damage and trying to stay on (a familiar will have enough HP to survive some attacks), etc. A "purely narrative" description of a cat (no stats) does not give you this and turns the game into Amber (but without the ability to start play with your own private universe).

 

[FitzTheRuke]

The one big hint that we have got is that either all or almost all of the monsters in the recent Desert of Desolation set of D&D Miniatures are going to be in the 4th edition Monster Manual.

What he said. The dinosaur in DoD is a "Macetail Behemoth" and it's an ankylosaurus.

So it looks like a page at least, maybe with 3 or 4 mean looking dino-monsters. I think they wanted to get away from a latin naming convention. Makes sense.

Also, I second the motion for out-of-the-box human/humanoid bandits, pirates, and other ne'er-do-wells. SOOOO common to fight, why would you have to make 'em up yourself? HUMAN is not a monster (in that it's not an opponent for PCs by itself, while selfish bastards who want to beat people up for their own gain, are.)

And don't worry if your favorite thing's not in there, between the MM being an annual book and whatever else comes out, there will be lots of selection in no time at all.

(I could see a Northern Campaigns book with Winter Wolves and Frost Giants and other good arctic encounters. Avalanche "traps", weather threats...)

Fitz

 

[Lizard]

Also, I second the motion for out-of-the-box human/humanoid bandits, pirates, and other ne'er-do-wells. SOOOO common to fight, why would you have to make 'em up yourself? HUMAN is not a monster (in that it's not an opponent for PCs by itself, while selfish bastards who want to beat people up for their own gain, are.)

Counterpoint: It is so easy to stat out human/humanoid opponents that having them pre-done takes away space from more interesting monsters.

I'd rather see that kind of space taken with some sort of quick-template feature for humanoids. ("Archer -- +2 Dex, -2 Str, Damage d8, +1 to hit at less than 6 squares")

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I want to see the cheesy stuff go, particularly the aberrations. acid spitting thing, flying sonic thing, weird flesh pulling off the skull cat thing. Things of that nature.

They're just... silly.

Gotta disagree. To me, weirdo monsters like the beholder, umber hulk, carrion crawler etc ARE D&D. Ive been in love with them since I got my bendy neo-otyugh when I was a wee lad.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Your game is not the world. Several of those monsters -- aranea, chaos beasts, merfolk, and winter wolves, for example -- have been major players in games i've run or played in. (By this I mean 'were a focus of many sessions of play, major powers in the world, long-running NPC allies ro foes, or all of the above'.

Um, what? At no point did I suggest that my game was "the world", nor that these represented the monsters everyone would wish to see cut. Quite the contrary. I mean, if you're going to say things like that, perhaps you could quote, instead of of misleading people?

I could find games, I'm sure, where almost every monster in every MM/MC has played a very significant and long-running role. That's meaningless. So is your entirely anecdotal claim that you've seen X, Y and Z used well.

Look what I said:

It's not that these monsters suck, though many of them do. It's that they're either wierd or often unused (and I'm sure ENworld can produce anecdotes about all of them, but come on...), and basically represent a HUGE amount of fat that can be trimmed.

Did you read that bit? I'll say it again for clarity: "I'm sure ENworld can produce anecdotes about all of them...". I put monsters I've gotten good use of on that list (Aranea, particularly), notice, because that's a list of the monsters I believe (however inaccurately) are relatively rarely used, without regard to whether I like them or not (admittedly, I hate Phantom Fungus ). Somebody somewhere gets good use out of every monster.

That doesn't mean it needs to be in the MM1. There's only limited space in the MM1, and it needs to be used with "primary" monsters, not ones you see once in a few campaigns, and not ones that are used significantly only in one campaign in every few dozen. I know very well that your position is that you love obscure monsters, and that you love 3E and how you can apply a half-dozen templates to a monster, and that to you that's cool, but I don't understand your apparent assertion that the monsters I say can/should be cut from the MM1, shouldn't be. Well, dude, something is going to get cut? Should we cut the dragons so we can have Merfolk and Aranea?

If you, like most people, including me, would keep a few things from my list, that's cool, but do you really think that my list doesn't include a very large amount of "trimmable" monsters? To be reintroduced later, sure, but not "basics" or "essentials" or "primary" monsters, or however one wants to put it. Please recall too, that it should be much easier to make up monsters in 4E than 3E.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Maybe they'll cut dinosaurs,

Pretty sure dinosaurs are in, just now called behemoth. From what I understand, every monster in the desert of desolation mini set is in the 4e MM1, and there was an ankylosaur in the set.